The Bangladesh Telecommunication Regulatory Commission (BTRC) will soon form a technical audit team aiming to detect revenue dodging by mobile phone operators and illegal Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) business, according to officials at the telecom regulator, UNB reported.

They said the technical audit team will work to find out the real amount of call termination and monitor weather all the telecom operators and VoIP businessmen are skirting around the rules.

This audit team, which will be formed in line with the recommendation made by the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Posts and Telecommunications Ministry, will recruit a big technical audit firm to keep watch on the illegal call termination and the revenue tricks, said BTRC secretary M Sarwar Alam.

On 17 December 2014, the standing committee recommended the ministry and BTRC to float a re-tender for establish a Centralised Monitoring System (CMS) to resist illegal VoIP businessmen and hiring an audit firm to audit calls.

If the CMS can be established it will help monitor the call volume of license holders and identify the illegal VoIP businessmen to stop the illicit business.

According to sources at the ministry, the audit firm will keep watch whether telecom operators are giving right information about the incoming and outgoing international calls to the government.

Besides, the BTRC has taken some other initiatives, including special drives, to wipe out illegal VoIP business.

Legal incoming calls routed to the country through International Gateway (IGW) have almost doubled over the last six months following the special drives against the illegal VoIP business, the BTRC sources said.

But, the rate of illegal call termination – which means illegal routing of phone calls from one company to another – is still very high in the country, depriving the government of huge revenue, they observed.

Talking to UNB, BTRC secretary M Sarwar Alam claimed the amount of legal incoming calls has increased to 10-11 crore minutes on average every day, which was only 5.46 crore in June, 2014 and 4.65 crore in 2013 following the special drive against illegal VoIP business.

The BTRC, in association with different law enforcement agencies, has so far conducted 35 raids against those involved in illegal VoIP business and seized huge illegal channel boxes, gateway, servers, unregistered SIM cards, computers and many other instruments from the illegal VoIP operators, he added.

The BTRC secretary also noted that they are looking forward to increasing the raids against illegal VoIP businessmen in the current year.

It has already conveyed its interest for conducting further drives to Posts and Telecommunications Ministry, and the ministry is also considering it positively as the government’s revenue is likely to get a boost if the high rate of illegal call termination can be reduced, he added.

Talking about the widespread VoIP business in the county, Kazi Firoz Rashid, a member of the Parliamentary Standing Committee, alleged that some influential people are involved in this illegal business.

“We can arrest the illegal VoIP businessmen and punish them. However, those who have been arrested are not enough. The government is losing huge revenue in this field alone,” he told UNB.

He urged the government to take tougher steps to stop the illegal business.

The BTRC has already created a Call Detail Terminal Record (CDTR) with a view to getting the exact account of international calls, and gauge call volume of telecom operators.

It has awarded the International Gateway (IGW) license to 29 operators while 26 and 37 organisations got the Inter Connection Exchange (ICX) license and the International Internet Gateway (IIG) license respectively.

The government gets Tk 1.5 per minute for international incoming calls from the 23 IGW registered operators.

Some BTRC officials, preferring anonymity, alleged that some influential people are operating illegal VoIP business by setting up various machines in residences in some important areas.

But they are managing to shift the machines to another place before the law enforcers are managing to reach the areas, they added.